Threadbare excuse for a forgery

As Christmas approaches, we all start rushing to expensive restaurants so we can overeat like pelicans (and, like pelicans, whichever way we turn we find an enormous bill in front of us). Face it, obesity will soon be rife throughout England's green and pleasant land, which is why I've just invented Vic's Miracle Slim Plan. With the aid of a sewing machine, I shall run up a pair of trousers with an 82in waist, then place advertisements in national newspapers for my Miracle Slim diet food (only £50 a can), along with a photo of me standing inside the giant trousers and declaring, "I lost 30 stones in a month, with Vic's Miracle Slim Plan!" Come January, the orders will flood in.

OK, my Miracle Slim Plan is nothing more than a thin ploy (with an optional thick woolly ploy for those cold winter months), but I'm confident that the more gullible section of the public will believe my spurious claim. After all, they've believed for centuries in that other thin ploy known as The Shroud of Turin, to which the History Channel devoted almost an hour last night, despite the patent absurdity of the claims being made on its behalf. "Could the answers lie beyond the comprehension of even science?" thundered the narrator, before leading us on a chase that even a wild goose would have considered pointless, as he strove to convince us that this dubious piece of cloth really might bear the image of the recently deceased Christ. And long before this disingenuous piece of raving pseudo-science was over, I'd come to the conclusion that what I was watching was not the History Channel, but the Hysterical Channel.

Experience has taught me to be wary of earnest hackademics from minor American universities, and I wasn't surprised to see that the defence case was made almost exclusively by "professors" from the sort of US institutions where Darwin is still regarded as a dangerous subversive. "The image on the shroud gives you explicit detail of the passion and death of Christ," declared one (who clearly accepted biblical descriptions of the crucifixion as though they were gospel).

As for the members of the Shroud of Turin Research Project, their inability to detect any paint or scorching on the cloth during a brief examination in 1976 immediately convinced them that it must therefore be an authentic relic of the Messiah, with no other explanation possible. "We didn't have any preconceived religious predispositions," said a man with a preconceived religious predisposition, and perhaps there was something strange about the shroud after all, because by now your hitherto agnostic TV critic was looking heavenwards, and shouting out the name of Jesus Christ.

With no attempt at impartiality, the programme devoted 95 per cent of its length to the crackpot theories of the shroud's defenders, but no matter, because the remaining five per cent was ample time for the prosecution to comprehensively demolish the myths. There is no historical evidence whatsoever for the shroud's existence prior to 1355, and radiocarbon dating (unwisely permitted by the Catholic authorities in 1988) showed that the flax-based fabric dated from about 1350, thus suggesting to any reasonable person that this was simply a mediaeval forgery, passed off as a holy relic in a more credulous age. "The dates are just a coincidence," retorted someone from the University of Southern Indiana, who then ludicrously (and unsuccessfully) tried to demonstrate how a subsequent fire in Turin Cathedral might have magically altered the carbon-dating reading (now that would be a miracle). And by the close, the narrator was asking, "is it possible that, during the resurrection, Christ's body turned to light, giving off the radiation which imprinted His image on the shroud?" at which point I decided it was time to press the eject button on my VCR and leave these fools to their folly.

If I tell you that the costumes for the cheap reconstruction scenes of Christ's crucifixion were provided by a firm called "Hollywood Rags", you'll perhaps get an idea of just how seriously we should regard this threadbare example of scientific research. In the year 2000, it's beyond me why people should still be indulging in the sort of sky-gods talk with which our ignorant primitive ancestors assuaged their fears of a natural world that they didn't understand.